Photos offer ticket to Wonka

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Bring a toothbrush ... the first film Willy Wonka, played by Gene Wilder.

Many of Roald Dahl's whimsies came from his own adventures, writes
Steven Morris.

Fans may already know the origins of Willy Wonka's name (it was
adapted from a childhood toy called the Skilly Wonka). But even the
most avid of Roald Dahl's followers will probably not have realised
how a version of a soup made of meat, berries and mud which the
young Roald ate while on expedition in Canada turned up in his book
James and the Giant Peach.

Nor will they be aware of the connections between a barber's
chair in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, and one of Wonka's
confections, hair toffee.

Fresh details of Dahl's life and times that provide clues to the
inspiration behind some of his imaginings have been found in a
cache of photographs, most taken by the writer himself.

Forty of the photos are to be auctioned at Christie's in London
on Monday with the proceeds going to the Roald Dahl Museum and
Story Centre, which is being built in Great Missenden,
Buckinghamshire, the village where Dahl worked from a hut in his
garden.

Members of Dahl's family hope fresh interest in the writer - a
new film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp is being released
next year - will lead to curiosity about the sale.

Dahl's grandson, Luke Kelly, 18, a photographer, came upon the
photographs in the form of negatives and contact sheets in the
writer's archive. He was amazed at the insights they gave into
Dahl's life and at the quality of the photographs.

"They are very striking. The photos he took show what a strong,
creative, highly visual mind he had," says Kelly.

Dahl's interest in photography began at school. One of the
images to be auctioned shows a cross-section of a grass stalk he
took in 1933. In a hitherto unpublished letter he wrote: "It's
jolly good fun photographing such things as the brain of an
earthworm." Such fascination with the internal workings of
creepy-crawlies was to serve him well in some of his visceral
tales.

After school, Dahl spent time in Africa and the Mediterranean.
His photos of the bazaar at Baghdad, Babylon and the Arch of
Ctesiphon in Iraq particularly impressed Kelly.

In Boy, his autobiography, Dahl wrote of how he took the
photograph of the arch: "I was over the desert solo in an old
Hawker Hart biplane and I had my camera round my neck. I dropped
one wing and hung in my straps and let go of the stick while I took
aim and clicked the shutter. It came out fine."

But it is the photographs which can be linked directly to Dahl's
children's tales that may prompt most interest at auction. One
shows a group of boys crouched around a campfire. It was taken in
1934 by Dahl during a school expedition to Newfoundland. While on a
trek, the boys had to survive on a hot soup they called hooch, a
concoction of pressed meat, fat, berries and lentils boiled with a
little mud or weed. It is thought this was the inspiration for the
Centipede's song from James and the Giant Peach: "I've eaten
many strange and scrumptious dishes in my time/Like jellied gnats
and dandyprats and earwigs cooked in slime/And mice with rice -
they're really nice/When roasted in their prime/(But don't forget
to sprinkle them with just a pinch of grime)."

Also included in the sale is a photograph of Dahl having his
hair cut by a barber in Dar es Salaam. While in east Africa, Dahl
met a man whom he nicknamed UN Savory. He later wrote that Mr
Savory went to such lengths to hide his baldness that not only did
he wear a wig, he sprinkled Epsom salts on his shoulders and
pretended he had dandruff.

Such ridiculous behaviour and concerns about losing his own hair
inspired Dahl to get Wonka to invent hair toffee. "You eat just one
tiny bit of that," says Wonka, "and in exactly half an hour a brand
new luscious thick silky beautiful crop of hair will start growing
out all over the top of your head."

Another photo for Dahl scholars is a portrait of a tanned young
man sitting on a rock beside a stretch of water. The relevance to
the Dahl legend? It is none other than Roald's half-brother Louis,
who, thanks to his invention of a boomerang-like toy called the
Skilly Wonka, supplied the name of the world's most famous
fictional factory owner.